The Good Teacher

We have committed what to the republican founders was the cardinal sin:
we have put our own good as individuals ahead of the common good.
—Robert Bellah

We can defend whatever image of man we choose to defend.
—Norris K. Smith

In their book, The Good Society, Robert Bellah and his team followed up their ground-breaking research about the negative impacts of unrestrained individualism in our society with a presentation of a case for how we as Americans might once again live more in accordance with the republican values argued for by our Founders—values in which the benefits of personal freedom are not found at the expense of the common good. They, like Alasdair McIntyre in After Virtue, make similar arguments that what has gone missing from our society today is a shared understanding of the purpose of communal life and an absence of the internalized personal qualities needed to achieve this purpose. Bellah, et al do not use the actual language of “telos” and “virtue” as McIntyre does, but a teleological understanding of what it means to be a good society and the character needed to achieve it inform their entire case.

I share all this because as I have thought about how I want to make my case from last time that we humans have some common—even transcendent—conceptions of what living a good life entails, I have come see that I may need to follow a similar path in my arguing. I inherit the language of “virtues” and “purpose” and “ends” from thousands of years of human thought, and while it jerks this Kantian’s chain to do so, I find myself needing to employ some pseudo-Aristotelian elements in my argument. Just didn’t want any of my readers with formal training in philosophy to suddenly go “Hey! Didn’t he say he’s an anti-Aristotelian??” and simply dismiss me as a hypocrite.

Okay. Enough digressing. What I want to do today is to explore the nature of the “good,” starting with a narrow lens and working my way out from there, and therefore, I want to start with something I am intimately familiar with and to examine: what makes the good teacher? I’ve clearly written plenty about what I think constitutes good teaching, but what about the character of the individual doing it? In the language of Aristotle, what virtues must one possess to achieve the end, the telos, of being a good teacher? I want to identify three (though I think there are more), and I will explore them individually to try to make my case. They are: integrity, courage, and compassion; so let’s start with integrity.

First, when I use the term “integrity,” I am employing it in its fullest meaning—not just the notion of accurate, honest, and truthful but the concept of having a fully integrated self—and I employ it that way because one of the fundamental tasks teachers have to do nearly every second of every moment in the classroom is to judge other human beings. From grading to classroom management to disciplining, teachers are judging those in their care nearly nonstop, and if a teacher does not have the self-reflective capacity that comes with a fully integrated sense of self, they cannot recognize those moments when they have mis-judged.

Which is, second, why I claim integrity is one of the virtues of the good teacher. Not only do all those judgements need to be made as accurately, honestly, and truthfully as possible, the reality is that when they are not (or are made poorly), that fact needs to be recognized immediately and the necessary steps taken right away to repair a now broken relationship. Because all the research shows that the quality of the teacher-student relationship directly determines the quality of the learning occurring; hence, without integrity, a teacher cannot provide the best environment for student success.

The next virtue I am suggesting is “courage,” and again, I mean it in the fullest sense of the word—everything from bravery to resilience to resolve. Effective teaching involves determination, caring, vulnerability, and appropriately intimate rapport, and as a co-learner, it involves risking and making mistakes, not always knowing an answer to a question, and other similar moments of exposure to the judgement of others. Furthermore, on a pragmatic note, the profession also involves long hours for subpar renumeration compared to similar levels of training, as well as these day enduring the proverbial “slings & arrows” of education’s stakeholders (we do not get a lot of respect from society at large). Yet again, though, it is all about the quality of the teacher-student relationship, and if an educator cannot find the courage to put their best self into that relationship, learning suffers. It is with much reason that renowned educator, Parker Palmer, titled his magnum opus, The Courage to Teach.

Finally, I want to argue that the good teacher has the virtue of compassion—also meant in the fullest sense of empathy, kindness, and forgiveness. I believe that they must have this virtue because to know others truly as we ourselves are known requires love. Without love, the trust children need to risk willingly withers, and without willful risks, growth and change are simply not possible. Hence, the good teacher loves their students and seeks constantly to draw out in their students the power and strength to create the meanings that will surpass the teacher’s, and it is therefore in this gift of loving that the strongest teacher-student relationship can arise and the very best learning can occur. Without compassion, fully effective education just doesn’t happen.

However, the same can be said of a lot of human activity, and that is my ultimate point. Place the word “good” in front of almost any descriptor of a human—good coach, good waiter, good person—and the qualities of integrity, courage, and compassion are central to our understanding of their goodness. Indeed, I suggest that what all those millennia of crowd-sourcing I referenced in my last essay have determined to be true is that integrity, courage, and compassion are intrinsic a priori to any human understanding of the “good.”

Take compassion. Variants of the Golden Rule are found in every religion, culture, and philosophical tradition on the planet. Or integrity. A social species may or may not be able to survive without it (though probably not for long without it), but as countless civilizations that have risen and fallen have empirically demonstrated, such a species will never thrive without it. Courage, of course, is the tough one on my list because synonyms of the word have regularly been associated heavily with militaristic roles and behaviors. Yet even there, I would suggest that the historical moments of nonviolent resistance have demonstrated what true courage actually is and have even regularly evoked the virtue of compassion in others (images such as those from the Edmond Pettus Bridge on Bloody Sunday helped make the success of the Civil Rights movement possible).

Which brings me back to where I left off the last time I wrote. I made the claim that humans have determined that to live a good life is our telos, and that certain qualities of what that means—a life of integrity, courage, and compassion—are transcendent. You can decide for yourself if I’ve now made good (no pun intended) on the second claim; therefore, I want to conclude by turning my attention to the first one, that the good life is our telos.

But to do that I first need to remind us that the original Greek word as understood by Aristotle was that anything and everything has an ultimate end or purpose and that you cannot understand an object or a structure without discerning what this end or purpose is. A hoe, for instance, has the ultimate purpose of cutting soil in a particular fashion, and the difference between Aristotelian teleological thinking and modern teleology is that Aristotle thought that this telos was inherent to the hoe itself, baked in to the very essence of its structure. A hoe could literally not be a hoe without its telos.

Well, humans can literally not be humans without making meaning. Our brains are genetically hardwired to take our sensory input and add narrative to it. And as I argued last time, billions of minds over millennia of millenniums have regularly, consistently, and continually constructed the narrative—made meaning—that the ultimate purpose of being human is to live a good life. Thus, if something innate to our very nature keeps doing the same thing, I want to suggest that maybe we’re on to something after all.

Why then, though, has our society seemingly either abandoned this telos entirely or reduced it to the isolated “my good life?” This is where the critiques of Bellah, et al and MacIntyre hold up a powerful mirror for us to learn from, and we fail to pay attention to them at our peril. All virtues, of course, are aspirational, never fully achievable. But if we stop aspiring—as the minute by minute news barrage would seem to indicate too many of us have already done—then we are in real danger. As Bellah and his team put it in The Good Society:

We have never before faced a situation that called our deepest assumptions so radically into question. Our problems today are not just political. We have assumed that as long as economic growth continued, we could leave all else to the private sphere. Now that economic growth is faltering and the moral ecology on which we have tacitly depended is in disarray, we are beginning to understand that our common life requires more [of each of us]… and if [individual] power is our only end, the death in question may not be merely personal, but civilizational (p. 295).

I plan to hold up my end of the proverbial bargain and keep striving to be a good teacher who seeks to help their students learn how to be human well, and I am confident that many of my fellow educators will continue to do likewise as well. But we are going to need some allies.

Any takers?

References

Bellah, R., et al. (1991) The Good Society. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.

Bellah, R., et al. (1985) Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life. Berkeley: University of California Press, Ltd

MacIntyre, A. (1984) After Virtue, 2^nd Ed. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press.

Palmer, P. (1998) The Courage to Teach: Exploring the Inner Landscape of a Teacher’s Life. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

Our Moral Nature

The idols of the nations are silver and gold,
made by the hands of men.
They have mouths, but cannot speak,
eyes, but cannot see;
they have ears, but cannot hear,
nor is there breath in their mouths.
Those who make them will be like them,
and so will all who trust in them.
—Psalm 135:15-18

To a bibliophile, old-fashion bookstores can be dangerous.

Dangerous, that is, to the pocketbook.

Surrounded by shelves and shelves of the most marvelous and magnificent objects in the world, it can be terribly tempting to walk out with more than you intended, and the Siren call of some title or dustjacket is just waiting to make you take a second look until you succumb. Hence, I am confident that I am not alone in having more than one unread book occupying space on my own shelves at home.

However, courtesy of the pandemic, I have a lot fewer of them than I used to (what with libraries closed and other forms of social distancing), and while the habit of consuming the “unread” started as a time-killer during lockdown, it has become a type of quest on my part to have nothing on my bookshelves that has not also occupied my synapses. Since I’m also continuing to read new stuff as well and to keep up in my professional discipline, I am not accomplishing this quest very rapidly. But I am, so far, making progress.

And my most recent now-read book has made me realize that there are some books which you aren’t meant to read in your youth. Alasdair McIntyre’s After Virtue has occupied a spot on various shelves in my various domiciles since I was 21-years old, and though I have started it on two separate occasions that I can recall, I could never get past the opening chapters before my distain for all things Aristotelian caused me to exile it once more to gathering dust in my philosophy collection.

However, a quest is a quest, and so I approached reading it this time with a different type of determination and—as I discovered—with a different level of intellectual maturation. Because what I discovered was that there in McIntyre’s book was effectively a now nearly half-a-century old philosophical roadmap for how and why we, as a society, would end up with the utterly dysfunctional mess we find ourselves in today. The cognitive mess…the environmental mess…the political mess…. The intellectual roots of them all are analyzed and made available in those pages, providing fair warning to anyone willing and able to listen—which I couldn’t do back then because I was too busy being an unwitting part of those same roots.

I won’t recap everything McIntyre has to say (in part because some of it involves some very technical and formal philosophical writing), but if I can do him justice, I would summarize his core thinking like this:

when the Aristotelian thought paradigms employed for most of Middle Ages (and prior to that) were abandoned in favor of the scientific paradigms of the 1600s, it became necessary to discover new rational and secular foundations for defining moral behavior (i.e. what makes a good human). But this Enlightenment project failed “because the views advanced by its most intellectually powerful protagonists, and more especially by Kant, could not be sustained in the face of the rational criticism that Nietzsche and all his existentialist and emotivist successors were able to mount,” (p. 117) leaving us with a world where “good” is simply whatever passes for “good.”

Put simply, virtues (and therefore virtuous behavior) require a telos, an ultimate end or purpose, for what it means to be a good human, and when a teleological understanding of the world is tossed out, we are left with a world without virtues (hence—to state the obvious—the title).

Now, I have no desire go into the nitty-gritty of how McIntyre defends all of this or his reasoning for why his solution is to defend a variant of Aristotelian ethics and politics (it is a very dense and long book, and the reason why I have not written in quite a while). However, what I am going to suggest is that his arguments are strong enough to give this Kantian pause and that his analysis of the logical social consequences of the rejection of the Aristotelian paradigms for the scientific ones are so spot on that, as I said earlier, they are a road map to today. Hence, I am left wondering after finally reading this book whether the notion of a teleological vs. non-teleological approach to our understanding of ourselves may not explain a lot about the current world we live in and therefore might merit further exploration.

For starters, a teleological paradigm does not presuppose an Aristotelian version of one (the self-inflicted mental error in judgment which kept me from reading this book for so long). As a scientist, I understand well why the Aristotelian approach to studying the natural world was deposed (as does McIntyre). Without the fallibilism of the experimental method, it is not possible to determine the laws and rules governing our planet, our universe, and ourselves. That aspect of Aristotelianism had to be tossed to make any progress in our understanding of how the empirical world functions—something, again, that McIntyre does not dispute.

What makes me sympathetic to McIntyre’s general thesis, though, is his suggestion that maybe we didn’t have to throw the proverbial baby out with the proverbial bathwater. That same scientific “progress” has also led to an overpopulated, over-polluted planet baking in our unrestrained individualism that McIntyre does a strong job of tracing back to the rejection of the political and ethics portion of Aristotelianism.

Or more precisely, I want to argue, to the teleological nature of those political and ethical ideas. As an educator, a certain amount of teleology is built into my system. Lessons have goals; curricula have purposes; degrees have ends. Even the educational planning process known in the profession as “backward planning” has the “ideal graduate” of a given program as its navigational beacon. Furthermore, I remain convinced that education’s ultimate telos remains wisdom and to learn to be human well. Hence, I would argue that a teleological understanding—at least to some degree—infuses any and all teaching and learning.

But if a teleological understanding is part of something so central to our society as education, then why is it so absent from the rest of our cultural life? I suspect that it has to do with how we are asking the question, “what does it mean to be a good human?” We have externalized this ideal, assessing someone’s amount of consumption and productivity rather than the worthiness of their character, and we no longer cultivate a shared set of internalized qualities “because success is whatever passes for success [and therefore] it is [merely] in the regard of others that I prosper or fail to prosper” (p. 115). We have made what it means to be a good human independent of an individual’s integrity and so the notion of someone having a telos, a fundamental purpose or end, becomes a meaningless notion.

Furthermore, we see this problem not just in our culture at large but also even in our institutions for education as well. In public schools, the quality of learning is now judged almost exclusively by test scores and other external accountability measures, not by the kind of person we are producing; while in private schools, the focus is on college and university admissions, again not necessarily what sort of individuals we are sending out into the world. In practice, we have divorced our lofty ideals for learning from our actual measures of learning, and the results, I fear, speak for themselves in the abundantly evident dysfunctionality of our general society right now.

Which is not to claim that teachers and schools do not care about the moral character of their students or the graduates they produce. Nearly every educator I have ever met is deeply committed to nurturing worthy and worthwhile inner habits and qualities of mind in the children under their care. They simply do so frequently in antagonism to or in spite of the larger social constraints currently placed upon them. Attempts to cultivate good humans are alive and well in America’s classrooms; they’re just often being done undercover—and if you live in Florida, illegally.

Yet if all these efforts are underway as I claim, then a thoughtful reader might ask what exactly is being fostered? Haven’t I simply backed myself again into the problematic dilemma of what counts as “good” which is what McIntyre is arguing is the central issue for which the Modern (and now Postmodern) eras have no answers that don’t devolve to whim? Can I or anyone determine a purpose or end, a telos, to being human that is innate and not external, and if so, what good(s) does one need to possess to achieve it? And how might teaching and learning be involved?

I think the answers rest on how we want to define “determine.” In both psychological and moral development, every single one of us goes through the stage where we become aware of the relativity of everything and the absence of certainty—the fundamental fallibilism of all human knowledge. Much grist has been milled about this reality, and it has even caused some to declare that truth of any kind is impossible, that all human thought is simply about emotion and will. However, as psychologists such as Lawrence Kohlberg have pointed out, most of us move past the stage of relativity to the stage of commitment—to where we treat a body of knowledge as truthful and live our lives accordingly.

Which as Jonathan Rauch points out in The Constitution of Knowledge does not mean there is neither actual truth nor real knowledge; it just means that we have to find it in the crowd sourcing of the reality-based community. And that brings me back to “determine.” Do I think that we can rationally discover with absolute certainty for all time a telos for being human? No. David Hume dismantled that philosophical quest a long time ago. However, do I think there is a purpose to being human that can be determined and known, that can be committed to? Yes. Because literally billions of minds have been wrestling with this idea since minds first evolved, and after tens of thousands of millennia of crowd-sourcing this fallible proposition, I would argue that humanity has determined that our telos is to live a good life and that our understanding of good has some determinates that transcend culture, place, or time.

What those are and how they relate to teaching and learning I leave for next time.

References

Hume, D. (1977) An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company.

Kohlberg, L. (1981) The Psychology of Moral Development. New York: Harper & Row.

MacIntyre, A. (1984) After Virtue, 2^nd Ed. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press.

Rauch, J. (2021) The Constitution of Knowledge: A Defense of Truth. Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution Press.